The disaster did not come as a bolt from the blue. Between 1982 and 1984 a local journalist from Bhopal, Rajkumar Keswani, published several stories on safety lapses at the Union Carbide plant. On 26 September 1984, one of Keswani’s articles presciently warned ‘Bhopal [is] sitting on the brink of a volcano’.

Considered the world’s worst industrial incident in modern times, the Bhopal gas tragedy was a chemical accident at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.